November 10th, 2004

Heather Ford came to the Digital Vision Program with a bold vision of how information technology tools might be employed to help end the recurring conflicts in Africa’s Great Lakes region.

However, not long after beginning the program, she changed tack dramatically and began working on issues of intellectual property and copyright law. Though these fields may seem quite different, Heather maintains that her final project was simply a more effective way of working towards fulfilling her original goal.

Based on her work with various NGOs, Heather believed that recent strife in the Great Lakes region had been exacerbated by a lack of communication between the area’s many groups. To address this problem, Heather proposed a suite of online resources that would allow national and international organizations to share information about regional conflicts as they developed.

However, once at Stanford, her thinking underwent a radical transformation. “You meet all these incredible people through the program who have been a force for change in their communities,” she said. “And you keep asking yourself the question, ‘What can I do to make real change for my people?’”

“I realized that the conflict resolution project was not about individuals, but rather about group dynamics, geography and political history. That’s really interesting and it’s still a very important project. But I realized that I wanted to do something that would be sustainable and creative, something that I was passionate about and that I would want to continue after the program had ended.”

Inspired by this realization, Heather became involved with Creative Commons, a non-profit organization housed at Stanford Law School that promotes alternatives to traditional copyright practice. Through a set of free public licenses, the group encourages increased public access to original works while protecting certain key rights for the works’ creators. Heather envisioned that these ideas could have an enormous impact on her home country of South Africa by making education and cultural production more accessible to individuals in underserved communities.

Over the course of the program, Heather laid the foundation for a Creative Commons initiative in South Africa by developing a web portal (http://za.creativecommons.org) to promote the group’s ideas and showcase local Creative Commons-licensed content. Heather also played an active role in the organization’s effort to expand internationally, using an online collaboration technology known as a “wiki” to set up an intranet for Creative Commons volunteers all over the world.

And though it may appear that she abandoned her original idea, Heather does not see her work with Creative Commons as a departure at all. “I believe,” she said “that creativity is something so sacred and critical to meaningful human existence that it can do a great deal to solve conflict and poverty. We can live in violent societies, in absolute poverty, but it is the creative spirit that can still make life meaningful and interesting. At the moment, I see Creative Commons as one of the ways to nurture that potential.”

—Mike Nowak

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